FACTORY Review
SugarBytes’ Factory is sort of their “powerhouse” or flagship synthesizer. By far being one of the most straight forward with a wide variety of options and modulations, it wants to be both a creative playground and/or your bread and butter synthesizer. If you don’t already have a bread and butter option, Factory can actually fill this role quite well, it has the options necessary to do all your standard sounds. But in a world with more and more great options, including free ones, Factory stands out more for its creative features. Sugarbyte’s always puts their own spin on things, and even though this is one of their more “standard” products, there’s quite a few interesting options here.
Factory has two multi mode oscillators, a single multi mode filter, several modulation sources, and three effects slots. There’s a variety of interesting oscillator and effects types to chose from giving you some unique combinations. Some of these combinations are on the silly side, but others can sound surprisingly beautiful and professional. Factory also has an interesting arp section and the ability to morph between two plugin states. Where Sugar Bytes puts their most unique spin on things is in the modulation matrix, an 8x8 matrix with assignable sources and destinations, you’ll notice blue and pink orbs representing positive and negative modulation depths. Where things get interesting is the dice, tweak and modulator controls. These allow you to randomize and morph the entire matrix all at once, with the modulator allowing this to happen automatically. It’s quite a fun way to get wildly unpredictable motion out of your patch.
OSCILLATORS: there’s about 8 different oscillator types (if you skip some redundant ones) each offering two to four controls to shape their various tones. You can even use the oscillators as modulation sources in the matrix to get some audio rate modulation.
-Pulse/Saw Sync: Basic hard sync, always a fun sound, Factory gives you the additional option to change the keytracking for new melodic tone variation.
-Saw Fractal: Similar to sync, has a bit of a combed sound, I want to look into “fractal” oscillators in the future, as they are rare, but I wonder how similar they are to one another.
-FM Formant: Combination 2 op fm with formant shifting, very capable of harsh dirty sounds.
-Transformer: A simple granular style oscillator, it can scan a sample and has formant shifting
-Wavetable PWM, Sync, Formant, Drone: A variety of wavetable options are available, with a secondary effect parallel to previous options. The Wavetable Drone mode is notable though, as it has a cool “jitter” effect that can add some nice shimmer or glitchy chaos to your table.
-Waveguide: A physical modeling oscillator, I’m not sure if it’s a single comb or a couple in a feedback matrix. This uses pulsed wavetables as the source audio to provide different tones.
EFFECTS: Factory contains over a dozen different effects, many of the classics are available here, but there’s also a few unique options as well. I will be focussing on some of the more interesting effects here, but I would like to say that it’d be nice to see some of these in their multi effects like Looperator or Effectrix. It’s also very nice to see stuff like a compressor and EQ alongside things like delay and chorus/phase/flanger.
-Delays: Three delay options are available, a two tap “groove” delay, pitched delay, and reverse delay. There’s no indication of timing, but they don’t seem to go very short at all
-Corpus: A resonator effect, I’m not sure if it’s based at all off of the Ableton device of the same name, but it’s basically the same idea. It has a very acoustic quality, it’s not a comb type resonator, definitely feels like a small resonant body such as a cabinet, acoustic guitar body, or drum membrane.
-Pianoverb: Another physically modeled resonator, this time designed to emulate piano strings reverberating. Quite a unique effect that I’ve never really seen anywhere else, I’d love this as a standalone plugin.
-Shimmer: It’s always nice to see shimmer reverbs on synths, they can really change a sound so being able to incorporate them into presets is powerful. I can’t say this one is all too special however, but on pads and ambient content it works just fine.
-Lofizer: Bitcrusher, AM, and distortion, I really like the tone of the amplitude modulation on this one. It seems to produce sideband frequencies, but it just has such a juicy squelchy tone when it does that this is almost a bonus
As for modulation, Factory also has two LFOs which can be set to smooth or stepped random, a sample hold modulator that can be used as an actual sample hold receiving inputs from other modulation sources and four Sequencer lanes. Each sequencer lane can have a variety of shapes per steps, they can be set to different step lengths as well for easy polymetric modulation. It’s not quite an MSEG but it does allow for quite a lot of unique rhythmic motion. You can also randomize sequences easy with a click of a dice button. The filter is pretty basic, there are comb and formant options, and your classic options as well, but not a whole lot more.
On the surface Factory might not seem like the most exciting synth on the market, but it’s definitely one that sweetens the deal for the Sugar Bundle as it does offer some really fun features. I love the emphasis on physical modeling, it’s almost a deeper physical modeling synth than some dedicated ones out there. As for complaints, effects each get one modulation connection point, so you can route to any of the controls, but whichever ones are active share the same modulation source and depth. Also I’m not a fan of how SugarBytes uses “init” presets in the preset browser rather than a dedicated “init” button. Otherwise, I don’t reach for this one often, but whenever I do, I’m pleasantly surprised with some new sounds.
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FACTORY: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/2451-Factory?a_aid=61c378ab215d5